TYAN Tiger K8W S2875 User Manual page 67

Latency: the amount of time that one part of a system spends waiting for another part to
catch up. This occurs most commonly when the system sends data out to a peripheral
device and has to wait for the peripheral to spread (peripherals tend to be slower than
onboard system components).
NVRAM: ROM and EEPROM are both examples of Non-Volatile RAM, memory that holds
its data without power. DRAM, in contrast, is volatile.
Parallel port: transmits the bits of a byte on eight different wires at the same time.
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect): a 32 or 64-bit local bus (data pathway)
which is faster than the ISA bus. Local buses are those which operate within a single
system (as opposed to a network bus, which connects multiple systems).
PCI PIO (PCI Programmable Input/Output) modes: the data transfer modes used by
IDE drives. These modes use the CPU for data transfer (in contrast, DMA channels do
not). PCI refers to the type of bus used by these modes to communicate with the CPU.
PCI-to-PCI bridge: allows you to connect multiple PCI devices onto one PCI slot.
Pipeline burst SRAM: a fast secondary cache. It is used as a secondary cache because
SRAM is slower than SDRAM, but usually larger. Data is cached first to the faster primary
cache, and then, when the primary cache is full, to the slower secondary cache.
PnP (Plug-n-Play): a design standard that has become ascendant in the industry. Plug-n-
Play devices require little set-up to use. Devices and operating systems that are not Plug-
n-Play require you to reconfigure your system each time you add or change any part of
your hardware.
PXE (Preboot Execution Environment): one of four components that together make up
the Wired for Management 2.0 baseline specification. PXE was designed to define a
standard set of preboot protocol services within a client with the goal of allowing
networked-based booting to boot using industry standard protocols.
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks): a way for the same data to be stored in
different places on many hard drives. By using this method, the data is stored redundantly
and multiple hard drives will appear as a single drive to the operating system. RAID level
0 is known as striping, where data is striped (or overlapped) across multiple hard drives,
but offers no fault-tolerance. RAID level 1 is known as mirroring, which stores the data
within at least two hard drives, but does not stripe. RAID level 1 also allows for faster
access time and fault-tolerance, since either hard drive can be read at the same time.
RAID level 0+1 is both striping and mirroring, providing fault-tolerance, striping, and faster
access all at the same time.
RAIDIOS: RAID I/O Steering (Intel)
RAM (Random Access Memory): technically refers to a type of memory where any byte
can be accessed without touching the adjacent data and is often referred to the system's
main memory. This memory is available to any program running on the computer.
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